


Home and Comfort

by CavalryofWoah



Series: The Robin Is The One [1]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics)
Genre: Because I DO WHAT I WANT, F/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, aged up/no underage, comic fandoms are weird and this doesn't really follow any explicit canon, could be gen is meant to be pre-relationship, what fuckin fandom do I even tag for this goddamnit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 02:23:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8559667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CavalryofWoah/pseuds/CavalryofWoah
Summary: The problem with Damian being a weird-ass GMO is that he doesn’t really understand being sick.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Aged up, plus reduced age difference, so Damian is like 19 and Steph is like 24? I don't even know imagine what you want.   
> Continuing my nice trend of getting titles from Emily Dickinson poems, this one is from "The Robin Is The One/VI" which coincidentally is an adorable name for a batkids relationship series so yeah.

The problem with Damian being a weird-ass GMO is that he doesn’t really understand being sick.

In all the years she’d know him, Steph had never once seen him get so much as a cold. Dick’s a bit like that, too, healthy as a horse and rarely under the weather. Bruce isn’t, but he toughs it out and takes more vitamins every day than Steph has in her  _ life _ so it probably cancels out. 

The point being, Damian has no experience with being sick or dealing with sick people, and he’s a bit of an incompetent asshole about it.

This was fine, at first. Steph felt a little tired and blamed it on a late patrol, she sneezed a few times and blamed it on spring allergies, and she coughed a bit and blamed it on the smoke from a few recent house fires. 

Damian complained half-heartedly about the irritating sounds and having to pick up her slack, but other than being taken off the silent stakeout roster Steph was pretty much fully functional. Grumpy, but functional. 

And then they were patrolling together and Steph’s head started spinning and Damian barely caught her before she went splat on the pavement. He’d insisted on carrying her home, and she’d told herself the whole way that just one more minute and she’d demand he let her down. She would put up with it just until she got her breath back. 

Only the jostling and the wind had kept her awake in his arms until they got to her apartment. 

She’d slipped in through her bedroom window, and when he followed her inside he found her sliding down the wall. Frantic demands for instructions had led to Damian rifling through her bathroom cabinet for her thermometer while she peeled off her boots, gloves, and cowl.

He’d tried to stick it in her mouth before she’d explained it went on her forehead. 

“Brown, what is your baseline?” Damian asked sharply, staring at the readout. 

Steph groaned, trying to think. “97.6, I think? Why, what’s the damage?” 

“102.4,” he replied. He scowled down at her, and she was trying to decide what the particular combination of negative emotions on his face was supposed to mean when he decided to pick her up again. 

“Woah! A little  _ warning, _ Batbrat?” 

“Tt. You were incapable of moving on your own.” He set her down on her bed gently, and Steph definitely  _ was not _ embarrassed about the way her chaotic nest had half-migrated to the floor. Just because  _ he _ was an obsessive neat freak with a butler didn’t mean everyone was. 

“So? You still should’ve asked!” Her argument probably would’ve been more effective if her eyes were in focus. Sadly, that was beyond her current capabilities. 

“Tt.” 

“That is  _ not _ an answer to everything, Damian.” 

“Tt.” 

Steph weakly pulled one of her many blankets over her head. “I hate you.” 

“You are still in uniform,” Damian said.

“Too tired to care,” she grumbled from the nest. 

She heard a sigh and retreating footsteps and gave herself permission to rest her eyes. Just for a bit. She’d get up and deal with things soon. 

“Sit up, Brown.” 

Steph startled, jolted unexpectedly from the edge of sleep. She’d thought he’d left. “Wha’?” 

“Sit up,” he repeated, and Steph was, honestly,  _ so confused what the hell _ . 

She peeled the blankets back partly out of curiosity and mostly so he’d leave her alone to die. 

There, standing at her bedside, was Damian sans most of his costume. Well. Sans the boots and gloves and cape and mask. His socks had tiny weiner dogs on them, and part of Steph wondered if she was just having a really strange fever dream. 

“Up!” he insisted grumpily, and he tugged at her and her pillows until she was sitting up against her headboard. Then he shoved a bottle of nyquil and a glass of water at her. 

“Where did you even get this?”

“Your bathroom.”

“How did you even know…?”

“Tt. I am not an imbecile.”

“So you Googled it, huh?”

Steph grimaced and set the water on her nightstand. Damian watched her struggle briefly with trying to measure medicine with shaking hands before he snatched it back and did it for her. 

She tossed it back like a shot of bourbon (foul, burning, and if any hit her tongue she’d be tasting it for hours so tilt her head back and  _ hope _ ) and coughed, fumbling for the water. College pop culture lied to her. Steph never got very good at doing shots. 

“Don’t be so pathetic, Brown. It was only medicine.” 

Steph stared at him in disbelief. “Dami, if you’d ever had to take cough syrup you would  _ not _ be saying that, holy shit. They make it as awful as possible because people like to drink it and get high, so the rest of us have to suffer.” 

“How bad can it possibly be?” he scoffed. 

“...lick the measuring cup and find out.”    
Despite knowing he had a close to zero chance of getting sick from her germs, Damian hesitated. At her raised eyebrow, he set his jaw and took the dare. 

Seconds later, he was stealing her water and wincing. 

“Not so judgemental now, huh?” Steph asked smugly, crossing her arms. She lifted one to to cough harshly into her elbow, by now a deep, concerningly wet sound. It went on for longer than she expected, and in moments she was hunched over and gasping around the involuntary barking. 

Clumsily, Damian patted her back, and she leaned into the warm weight of his hand as she relaxed. Despite the temperature he had taken, she felt like she’d gone ten rounds with Mr. Freeze, and she looked up at Damian with a pathetic, exaggerated pout until he retrieved her fallen blankets from the floor and gave her a few more layers. 

“Thanks, Dami,” she wheezed. 

“You are… welcome, Brown. You must drink the rest of that glass and at least one more. When was the last time you ate? Do you have soup? What will--”

“Damian!” Steph cut him off, eyes wide. “Don’t be such a worry-wort, I’ll be fine. Just lemme sleep it off.”

“I am  _ not _ worried,” Damian said defensively. “I simply do not trust you to take proper care of yourself, Brown. I do not look forward to taking your entire patrol route while you are ill.” 

“Awwww, if that wasn’t so condescending it have been nice. I swear, I’ll be right as rain tomorrow.” 

“Tt. Unlikely.” Damian frowned at her for a moment, and if Steph had enough energy to be observant she would have worried over the contemplative look in his eyes. “Shove over, Fatgirl.”

“Hey!” she protested quietly. Satisfactorily distracted by the insult, Steph put up no resistance when Damian squeezed into her bed and stole one of her layers. “What’d’you think you’re doing, Wayne?” 

“I will stay and make sure you recover adequately, Brown.”

“That’s really not--” 

“Sleep,” he said, pulling his phone from his utility belt. “I will wake you in a few hours and make sure you consume more water and nutrients.” 

“Okay,” Steph started dazedly, “a) you don’t need to do this, and b) ‘consume more nutrients’? Really?” 

“What?” Damian said, rolling his eyes. 

“No one actually  _ talks _ like that, D. Language is all about--” more coughing “--getting the meaning across in the fewest words possible.” 

“Negative. It is about conveying exactly what you want to say as  _ precisely  _ as possible.” 

“Nuh uh. Look, word choice, tone, level of formality… people communicate with those just as much as the actual things they say. You don’t really vary the level of formality at all, ever.” 

“So?” 

“So you’re not communicating as effectively as possible. To strangers especially, you’re sending off signals you probably don’t mean to,” Steph explained, listing sideways. When had her head landed on Damian’s shoulder? Why hadn’t he complained yet?

“Tt. Perhaps I am sending the message I wish to, Brown. Formal language choice implies a certain distance and maturity that I wish to maintain.” 

“It works a little better than it used to,” she conceded. “You used to just come off as a condescending know-it-all. I mean. You still do. But it was worse when you were a midget.” 

“I was not legally a midget when we met, Brown. I was over five feet tall, and I did not have any form of dwarfism. My mother would not have permitted it.” 

“Okay, we’re gonna ignore how sad that is because I’m too tired to deal with it, okay? We can have the ‘your mom kinda sucks’ convo some other time,” Steph breathed, dragging her eyes open again briefly before giving up the ghost. She nuzzled further into his warm shoulder and told herself it was an accident. Just the sickness. 

If it wasn’t, Damian need never know. 

And if he kissed her sweaty forehead, well. Definitely just a fever dream. She certainly wasn’t gonna  _ ask _ him.

But. It was.  _ Kinda _ nice. Maybe.

And over the next two days, Damian got to witness all the annoying flu symptoms he’d been missing out on all these years. Even the snotty tissue bits. 


End file.
